


Flourishing, and How It Is Done

by AliceInKinkland



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 17:50:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21360253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceInKinkland/pseuds/AliceInKinkland
Summary: There’s a legend that anyone who ends up on Helikar can never leave again.
Relationships: Hard-bitten Post-apocalyptic Wanderer/Lost Dimensional Traveler from a Better Timeline
Comments: 14
Kudos: 23
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	Flourishing, and How It Is Done

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).

Tiza is sorting through scrap when a woman comes up to her and says, “Are you Tiza?”

Her accent is strange. Tiza looks her up and down. She’s gorgeous: full body, long locs framing her rich brown face, deep dark eyes. She’s dressed in a way Tiza has never seen—the fabrics of her clothes so clean and bright that she stands out starkly in the middle of the trash-picking field.

“Who’s asking?” says Tiza, crossing her arms, suddenly horribly self-conscious that she isn’t sure the last time she washed her shirt.

“My name is Kel. I need to get to Helikar City,” says Kel. Her accent is truly odd, and her sentences sound off somehow, formal and stilted. “And I’ve been asking around, and people say you’re the one to take me there.”

Tiza nods. “You can pay?” Truth is, she’s been looking for a reason to leave this place. Being around so many people makes her nervous. It reminds her of things she’d rather not think about. A seven-day hike to Helikar City is exactly the ticket. But she still needs to know if this Kel will make it worth her while.

“I’ve got gold,” says Kel. She says it way too loudly, and Tiza glances around to see if anyone else has heard. A more unscrupulous person than Tiza would knock her down and grab the gold right now, but Tiza is better than that. Mostly. She feels better than that right now.

And she really does want an excuse to get out of here. People can spend their whole lives here, picking through garbage and selling it for weak stew and pennies. She’s been here almost a month, and that’s long enough. Time to move on.

“OK,” says Tiza. She’ll check the existence of the gold later. For now, she nods, brushes her hair out of her eyes, and says, “Let’s get out of here, then.”

* * *

“So,” says Tiza, on the first day of their journey together, “Why d’you need to get to Helikar City? You from around there?” No one lives in the city itself, of course; no one but the kinds of people neither of them want to be running into. But people still live around there, some of them even in the gated pre-Collapse compounds. This Kel looks rich—well-fed, skin glowing. Maybe she’s from there.

“Actually, I’m from right around here, but, well—another dimension,” says Kel. She holds up a strange device; it looks a bit like a jar-lantern, the kind Tiza remembers making as a child. “This is Terra-12654-bh, right?”

“This is Helikar,” says Tiza. “The Forgotten Continent.”

“In my world, Terra-12637-jl, Helikar is known as the Flourishing Realms,” says Kel. “I’m a scientist there, and—so actually, something’s gone wrong with my fieldwork here. This broke--it’s essentially an interdimensional transport device.” She gestures at the lantern-like object “It’s telling me the closest place to get the metal I need to fix it is Helikar City, and I need someone to take me there.”

Tiza nods. The woman seems sincere, and Tiza knows it’s possible, this dimensional travelling business. It’s not exactly a scientific priority, in her hollowed-out world, but maybe in Kel’s it’s their latest frontier.

“The Flourishing Realms, huh?” says Tiza. “What if you didn’t pay me in gold, but instead took me back with you?” You gotta grab hold of opportunities like this when they are presented to you, that’s what Tiza has learned in her life.

Kel shook her head. “That would be against our ethical code. Even giving you a small amount of a metal that already exists on your world is a thing I’m only allowed to do in a real emergency.”

Tiza nods. It was worth a try.

* * *

“There’s a legend,” says Tiza,on the third night, when they’ve built the fire and are sitting around it after a long day of walking across the Salt Plains, “that anyone who ends up on Helikar never gets off again.”

“Sounds more like a...belief, a superstition,” says Kel. She gestures with her free hand, a way to make the words flow, while she uses her other hand to turn her stick in the fire, roasting the rabbit Tiza caught earlier.

“Maybe that’s a way our languages differ,” says Tiza. She wants to kiss her on her full, soft lips, wants to pull her down into the underbrush, but when they did that last night it was darker, later, and they haven’t talked about it since. “What does ‘legend’ mean, in your dimension?”

“I’m not a linguist,” says Kel. She has a way of demurring that is out of sync with her general air of confidence, Tiza has noticed. Tiza has noticed a lot of things about Kel, in the few days they’ve spent together.

“But it’s not the same thing as a belief?” says Tiza. She pulls her stick out of the fire and begins biting the meat off. Hot juices run down her chin, which only makes her think more about Kel’s body and the things she’s like to do to her.

“A legend is more of a story. It’s got characters, and things happen, and there’s a start, and an end.”

“Huh,” says Tiza. She’s not one for stories. Stories don’t keep you alive. But she likes Kel’s voice, so she says, “Tell me one of your legends, then,” and Kel does: a story, she says, from long ago, about a king, and his greed, and the gods who punished him.

Later on, they fuck again, beneath Tiza’s rough blankets, the fire burning low, and Tiza thinks, with sudden horror, that she is in love with this woman from another world.

* * *

A few days later, they reach the city, and by midday, Kel has found the rare metal she needed in the burnt-out husk of a buried and forgotten communicator band and fixed her lantern thing. They stand in the shadows of a sidestreet. Tiza has calculated all the exits (five), and knows which of her weapons she’d grab in the event of an attack of each one, but the street is quiet.

Kel kisses her. Tiza never wants it to end. It’s a weakness, but she can’t even care, not when Kel’s lips are as soft and yet firmly insistent as they are.

Kel draws back. “I wish I could take you with me. I really think you’d like it there,”

_Don’t rub it in, _thinks Tiza, but she says, “I understand.”

“I’ll try, OK?” says Kel. “I’ll try to get them to agree. I don’t want to leave you.” And before Tiza can mumble some other face-saving negation, Kel says, “I love you.” Just like that.

“I love you, too,” says Tiza. It is true but also maybe it’s not, because Tiza isn’t sure exactly what love is supposed to feel like, and she knows it’s unwise. But Kel is about to leave forever. Tiza will never see her again. So she lets herself say it. It’s fine.

* * *

After that, there are more kisses, and some wandering hands, and then Tiza pulls Kel into an alley, dead-ended, an impossibly dangerous position to be in but she can’t bring herself to care, and she guides her down on top of her: mouth and tongues, fingers and thighs, moans and silences.

And after _that_, when Kel activates the lantern and blinks out of existence, Tiza stands, unmoving, for a long, long time. Slipping her hand into her pocket, she discovers the gold, and it hurts—she didn’t need _payment_—but it’s also a welcome wealth, weeks or even months of safety.

Tiza can still taste Kel on her lips. She begins to walk. She’d like to be out of the city before dark.

* * *

Ten years pass, and sometimes Tiza has dreams—beautiful dreams, dreams that make her warm and happy and find her slick between her legs when she wakes. Dreams about Kel. She sees her locs bouncing as she ascends a hill, and Tiza runs after her. In her dreams she is never scared. In her dreams, forever is an all-encompassing blanket.

Tiza settles down, for a while, with a woman with hair the colour of the morning sun, in a community where the people look out for each other, build each other houses and teach each other’s children and make big communal meals and sing and dance long into the night. It is beautiful, but it reminds Tiza too much of the home she grew up in, a home she lost violently, and she finds herself laying awake, night after night, waiting for the gangs of red-toothed bandits to arrive with fire and rope and sharp, sharp knives.

So she leaves, and returns to her wandering, and on the nights when she is sleeping soundly, as safe as she could ever feel, in a cave or a tree hollow or a long-abandoned bunker, she dreams of Kel, her soft skin, her warm smile, her words.

The dreams hurt the next day. But Tiza is grateful. They could be worse. Dream-Kel could promise her, _I’m coming to get you_. Dream-Kel could make Tiza hope.

* * *

Tiza has never had the dream waking before. It’s probably a bad sign that she can see Kel now. Probably a worse sign that Kel looks so different: her face older, her locs gone in favour of intricate braid work criss-crossing her head.

The worst sign of all is when she speaks, because what she says is, “I got permission to bring you over, if you still want to come.”

It’s got to a dream, but Tiza has learned, over the intervening years, that caution is just as dangerous as recklessness, and Tiza learns, in this moment, that she could never say no to Kel.

She takes her hand. She closes her eyes.

When she opens them, she is in another world.

* * *

“You said this was going to be temporary!”

Kel’s voice echoes from down the hall. Tiza sits on her bed. There is a window, thick, both unbroken and, as far as she can tell, unbreakable by human hands.

“We just have to be assured that releasing her won’t do any harm—to her, or to the general population.” It’s one of the scientists. Their voices are hard for Tiza to distinguish from one another—just like Kel herself, they may technically speak the same language as Tiza did back in her dimension, but the accent and word choices are different enough that Tiza spends a lot of time struggling to simply parse what is being said around her. She also spends a lot of time in the shower, standing under endless hot water, and a lot of time being poked by needles, which is apparently a thing people do here to stop themselves from getting sick.

“She’s been vaccinated, tested—she’s safe to be around people, come on!” Kel’s voice is rising in volume. “You said I could bring here here! The request was approved.”

“Come on,” says the scientist. “You must understand—this is completely unprecedented. There are safety concerns, and we really do have to do our due diligence—but there is also the matter of this being novel scientific event. It’s a fascinating—” and here she says a word that Tiza does not know, but she can guess: she’s a specimen.

She feels a surge of anger. Why did Kel trust her colleagues when they finally relented and said she could bring Tiza to this dimension? Why did she think she would be able to whisk her away and live a quiet life?

Why did Tiza trust her so totally? Why did she just say yes, and take her hand, and leave absolutely everything she knew?

Outside, people far below her walk through the city, and ride large, mossy platforms that glide down the street like leaves down a river. Bioluminescent lights gradually begin to glow as evening falls.

Tiza lays down on the impossibly soft bed, and tries to tell herself there are worse places she could be.

* * *

“Tiza?”

Kel’s voice is soft, hesitant in a way Tiza does not associate with her. Tiza sits up in bed. Kel is really here, in her room, and there are no scientists around with clipboards, observing. Kel is not wearing the protective gear they make her wear.

Are they finally letting Tiza go?

“We don’t have much time,” says Kel. Tiza notices how worried she looks.

“Kel? What is it?” Tiza gets out of the bed and closes the distance between them, grasping Kel around her full, soft waist.

“Want to run away with me?” says Kel. She smiles, but her eyes betray her fear.

“Again?” jokes Tiza.

“I found some plans,” says Kel. “They want to keep you here indefinitely. Study you. They might never let you go. But we could go, now, somewhere they couldn’t follow us.”

Tiza notices, for the first time, that Kel is holding the lantern--her interdimensional transport device.

“You want to give up your whole career?” says Tiza. “To live in a world like mine?”

“I want to be with you,” says Kel.

There are shouts in the hallway.

Tiza studies Kel’s face. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” says Kel, and grips Tiza’s hand in hers.

* * *

There is a legend, of sorts, about anyone who ends up within the borders of Helikar, on what the residents of that continent are unaware is Terra-12654-bh. The legend is: if you end up there, you’ll never get off, not since the planes stopped flying overhead, not since the whole continent was abandoned by the rest of the world, a dumping ground for past sins and present forgetting.

That legend is mostly true, but it’s complicated. Maybe some people have left, after all.

Maybe some have even come back.


End file.
